By Julia Djeke
Those Hare Krishnas in the Big Apple: A Skeptic’s Tale.
People barely look you in the eyes in New York City. They’re trained to avoid it, either by toying with their iPhones or noticing something flashier. The subtext is: anywhere but here, anyone but you.
Unsurprisingly, loneliness has weaseled into my life. It manifests as a sense of fumbling through the day and needing to muster up energy to do anything. I’ve grown increasingly isolated, spending days in my pajamas, staring down at my toes and cursing the unreasonable price of a pedicure. The beginning of the year has been a series of weeks marked by strange body odors and the gnawing realization that N.Y.C. had turned out to be a worthy adversary.
Call it mind reading or call it intuition, but somehow, a friend of mine picked up on these vibes. She reached out to me and asked if I’d join her for a Bhakti kirtan. I knew very little about kirtan, only that it was vaguely linked to bald Hare Krishnas who I suspected bathed in patchouli. But perhaps a deeper part of me wondered what kept them so damn happy. Why did they chant every day?
So I told myself that I would approach the kirtan evening with an open mind, in that investigative journalist sort of way. I accepted my friend’s invitation.
On Thursday night, we entered The Bhakti Center and were greeted by three smiling “Bhaktinis.” One of them offered me a cookie on a white napkin.
“Thank you,” I said, and walked over to the front desk to pay.
“That’s sweet,” said the receptionist, “but kirtan is free.”
Free? Nothing was free in New York.
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